The Anthropopause

“we want poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons…

“We want a Black Poem. And a Black
World.

“Let the world be a Black Poem.

“And Let All Black People Speak This
Poem

“Silently

“Or LOUD.”

(by Amiri Baraka)

The Anthropopause

“This transmission is coming to you…
This transmission is coming to you…

“Apollo 8, you are a go…
“We can see the earth… now.“

(Sampled by Crystal Method for “High Roller”)

‘Silently or LOUD,’
The poetry of liberation goes bigfooting along,
Crying out against the injustice it sees,
With debris-hopping footsteps it marches across the fading cityscape…
Crying against the injustice it SEES

As if it were the tall tale giant of old stomping over clearcut slash,
Treading now over block after block,
Over pothole, failing bridge, eroding dike
And other cracked and crooked concrete things
Built for a thousand years of empire and of art
Where were once displaced fields and rows,
That they themselves, of what was there when they came,
Drained and felled and burned and ploughed.

Even the most miserable account of human horror—
The bodies of slain mothers, fathers stacked for burning,
Or the children of refugees fleeing the conflagration
Washed up dead from drowning upon the shore
(Becoming meanwhile for us a tale or scene
From which we recoil because we see it, what it is,
What it says about human beings and our unkind,
And the depths of shadow we are at work,
At play, denying and so displaying)—
Even that is but the gentlest of caresses
When held up before an actinic and merciless desert sunlight
In close examination of our deeds everywhere done
Upon the earth from which–and no where else–we have been able to spring.

Shortgrass, Hardwood, Savannah, Forest,
Tallgrass, Woodland, Prairie, Wetland…
Abstract words for acres of expanse,
Instead more particular than the tiniest points upon a map,
Or the thinnest threads upon our aging faces;
Each one mottled and articulate as any person.
(That word too an abstraction capable of displacing and
Distancing from attention the expressions and tones of voice and manners
Of ones we wittingly or unwittingly confine in our naming of names.)
Each one a fractal rose—living things encompassing living things,
Composed of living things—
Invisible to us in our acts of market value, settlement, of going to,
of coming from,
Or even of picnicking on an idle weekend afternoon
under the warmth of an unseen sun.

It was—it is—an execration conducted
Without one clear moment of admission
Of what’s to be sentenced to the pit, the leach heap, the pyre.

The garden from which we have told ourselves we have been ejected,
Casting about looking for valuables to take,
Remains for us an empty shell or vessel to fill up with ourselves,
With schemes of power,
Flickering drama and jingle about anything and everything
Except what is there to be seen and heard.

Our surroundings have become by us bent around so many images of us there is no room for Other.

Even our most vivid pictures or stories of the animals and plants we admire
Become exercises in technical mastery
There for adulation that points back to us and little more—
Or are objects of fleeting diversion and hungry desire.